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Comment by weinzierl | Hacker News Reader

I used these for years. Especially the Windows handles checker I found incredibly useful.

That being said: When I recently recommended it to a friend he complained about virus scanner warnings. When we ran the tool through Virus Total we had a considerable amount of warnings and these were not only from the heuristic checkers.

I have considerable trust in Nirsoft and maybe these warnings are wrong but on the other hand I have confidence in Virus Total too.

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I've seen virus alerts for programs that I have written and compiled myself so many times that I don't trust antivirus by default. There are a number of API calls that trigger the alerts without further consideration.

They have a section on their Website about the AV issues.

https://blog.nirsoft.net/category/antivirus-issues/

Thanks, I never came across that.

Just learned on his blog that Google owns virustotal. Which is fine I suppose

Tools are so good malware started bundling it instead of re implementing functionality = virus scanners equal tool presence with malware, lazy.

Yup. Happened with SlimFTPd all the time around 2006 or so. Good tools that are easy to work with and very small get picked up by malicious actors very easily.

> When we ran the tool through Virus Total we had a considerable amount of warnings and these were not only from the heuristic checkers.

To be fair most anti-virus has a massive false-positive rate.

I’ve had my own software, built from clean source with no fishy dependencies, flagged for whatever reason.

My trust in AV-tech is about zero.

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